


and i want you, only

by indigostohelit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blasphemy, California, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Post-Canon, Road Trips, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 06:11:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18772855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: Sometime in 2024, somewhere in California. While driving across the West, Sam and Bucky go to a church, a restaurant, and a motel. They also have some conversations.





	and i want you, only

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a Russian Jew, don't ask me about churches. Mix of comics and movie canon: the Winter Soldier was a Soviet project as in the comic books, everything else is as per the MCU. Title from Thunder Road.

You stare at the little wooden box. The little wooden box stares back.

“Do I put in a quarter?” you say, eventually.

Sam laughs from one of the alcoves, where he’s examining a statue of what you assume is a saint. “Do I look like the guy who knows how much a candle costs?”

“Sure you do,” you say. “Why wouldn’t you? You’re not wholesome, or something? You’re wholesome as hell.”

“Take a look, everybody, the judge of wholesomeness, the guy who swears in a church,” says Sam to the empty pews, and meanders over from the saint to peer over your shoulder. “It doesn’t say what to put in.”

“It sure doesn’t,” you agree.

“If anybody looks like the guy who knows how churches work, it’s you,” says Sam. You look yourself pointedly up and down – raggedy blue jeans, robot arm, coat last washed a little after New Year’s, red T-shirt reading GREASY TONY’S TUCSON PIZZA, and he says, “No, smartass, Irish. You can’t bullshit me. I had to do a book report on you when I was ten.”

“I can’t believe you just gave me shit for swearing in a church,” you say. “You think I remember any of that crap? It’s been seventy-nine years, you insensitive asshole. I lost my memories. Maybe this is a trauma response. You don’t know.”

He eyes you. You eye him. After some time, he says, solemnly, “Fuck-damn.”

You start giggling, helplessly, like a kid. After a couple seconds, he breaks into laughter, too, leaning on you for support; when you’re both trailing off, he slips his arm around your waist, and plants a kiss on your cheek.

“What was that for?” you say, suspicious.

“For nothing,” he says; he sounds a little surprised. “For I wanted to. Getting one over on the man, I guess.”

Sam has explained to you about The Man. The Man is good, sometimes, when you're The Man, or when Sam is The Man, and bad at other times. You're still figuring out which is which. In this case The Man is probably bad, and maybe God, which seems pretty rebellious even for Sam Wilson.

“I really don’t remember any of this,” you confess; in the emptiness of the little building, between the walls and the dark wood, your voice vanishes without echo. “They didn’t have religion in Russia. Or, I don’t know, maybe they did, but they weren’t supposed to. I didn’t. No churches, no holidays. May Day. New Year’s.”

“Always winter and never Christmas, huh,” says Sam, and squeezes your waist a little. “You know what? You can put in a quarter.”

You hesitate. “You’re sure?”

“Hell no,” says Sam. “What are they gonna do, though? Arrest you?”

Going to actually light the candle gives you a nice little tour of the church, which is both smaller and older than you’d expected it to be; out here in California, you’d figured everything would be as wide and shiny as the sky, plastic and sunshine with the price tag still hanging off it. It’s dark in here, though, and it smells suffocating. The paintings hanging on the walls are hard to see; you can make out faded skies, the gold on some clothes, the whites of Jesus’ eyes. You think He’s on the cross, but you can't see much of anything behind Him. Mostly what you can see is His face, and the ghostly imprints of His hands. He looks sad, and ugly, and kind of old.

There aren’t any other candles burning, but there are the stubs of them, and empty glass jars scattered along the bye-altar. The wax-smoke smell of it does bring something back – a feeling more than a real memory, something about – night-time, and your mother's face – but it’s gone as quickly as it came, and you light your own little white candle in its glass jar and lower it carefully into an empty spot in the row, and push your hands into the pockets of the old coat, and try to remember if you’re supposed to say a prayer, or something.

You retreat, after a while, to one of the pews. Sam has gone back to carefully inspecting the saint-statue; he must be trying to give you space. You probably are supposed to say some kind of prayer. You probably learned it in Sunday school.

Eventually you just think, feeling a little stupid, _God, please keep his soul safe up there_.

You wait to see if anything happens. It doesn’t.

You add, _Thanks_ , just in case it helps. Then you stand up and make your way between the pews to Sam, and slide your flesh hand into the back pocket of his jeans. He doesn’t even startle; he just folds himself into you, easy as anything, and lets you drop a kiss on his forehead.

“Ready to get out of here?” he says.

The heat smacks you in the face as soon as you step into the sunlight. The two of you jog across the asphalt, swearing under your breath and squinting hard, and throw yourselves into the car, him first, you taking a second longer to scrabble up onto the dead-yellow grass of the berm facing the passenger seat. You slap at the AC; he starts the engine, a coughing, hiccuping rattle, and you peel away from the side of the road and shove yourselves towards the horizon, and you find yourself laughing again, like crazy, like you're getting away with something.

After another hour or so the sun starts to get low, and the sky starts to bloom color, deep-blue and soy-brown clouds. While Sam sneaks the shield from the trunk into the motel room, you make conversation with the guy at the front desk, who tells you about a taquería a couple streets away, and the two of you walk there once the shield's safely stowed, Sam whistling, your sleeves rolled up to your elbows. The shadows are long enough that they’re blurring into each other.

Maybe it’s thinking about the shield that does it. Maybe you’ve been wearing this expression since you walked into the church. Either way, when you’re standing in line to order, Sam looks at you, and he says, too casually to be casual, “I got him to order cabeza tacos, once. When he and I were out near here. Didn’t tell him what they were 'til he’d had five. I thought his jaw was going to fall off his skull.”

You laugh, startled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Sam, “and then he had three more.” He’s grinning.

You hesitate, and then you say it: “It wouldn’t have been like this, though. If this mission was you and him.” He’s looking at you quizzically; you stuff your hands in your pockets. “All of that, in the church. It wouldn’t have – happened.”

There’s a pause. The two of you step forward in line.

“You don’t think he would’ve lit a candle for you?” says Sam. There’s an edge in his voice, something you can’t quite parse. You don’t know if you’ve ever heard him really angry with you before.

“No,” you say, a little sharp yourself. “No, of course he would’ve. He’d light a candle for anybody. He would’ve been, I don’t know.” You hesitate. Putting this into words feels like biting down hard on your tongue. “Like. Noble about it.”

Sam thinks about that while you order your burrito, and thinks about that while the two of you assemble an army of plastic salsa cuplets from the chips bar. When the two of you sit down, he says, quietly, “I don’t think that’s fair.”

What you think is, _I just bet you don’t_ , and it surprises you with how sudden and vicious it is. You take a deep breath, instead of saying it. You press the edges of the metal soda cap into your palm.

“Maybe it isn’t,” you say. “I don’t know. I never really got much practice at being fair on my own.”

He takes that like it’s a physical hit: hard breath in, slow and careful out. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. I see what you mean.”

You look at the fluorescent light on the plastic tablecloth, at the dirt under your fingernails. “Okay,” you say.

“I was raised Baptist,” says Sam, a while later, when your dinners are a mess of tinfoil crumpled beside the chips basket. “For the record.”

The stars are splattered wild across the sky when you go outside; the air smells like exhaust and burnt rice. You catch his hand on the walk back to the motel, tangling your fingers with his, and he looks at you with some surprise but squeezes it hard. You like it, walking with your hand in someone else’s, with your hand in Sam’s, your arm swinging back and forth. It makes you feel like a kid.

From the second floor of the motel, while Sam’s digging in his pockets for the keys, you hear the faint slosh of the swimming pool by the stairs. You cross the little walkway to look at it; it’s pale green under the night-lights, shivering luminescence, reflecting no stars. Even from here you can almost smell the chemicals.

“Did you want to swim?” says Sam, behind you. It startles you; your fingers tighten on the railing, and let go.

“No,” you say. “No, let’s go in.”

While Sam’s in the bathroom you look at the shield. It does look shiny, and new. Like the opposite of the church. It even looks light, though you know it’s heavy. When you held it, right before you fell off a train, while you were saving Steve’s life, and also dying for him, incidentally, you probably thought it was heavy. It probably felt heavy, when you held it, then. You can’t remember that, though.

Sam coming out of the bathroom makes you look up. You keep looking. He’s in tight grey boxer-briefs, and nothing else, and as you watch, he stretches deliberately, and grins at you and bats his eyelashes a little.

“You fuckin’ tease,” you say, very fondly. “Get over here so I can suck your dick.”

When his cock’s halfway down your throat his hands go into your hair and stay there, gentle. Maybe tugging, a little; mostly just touching, though, his nails running lightly along your scalp, tangling with the length. It makes you feel – six feet underwater, never coming up for air; all the thoughts clean out of your head, just you and his body, clear and easy, the easiest thing you’ve ever done. His thumb on your neck. On your cheek. At the soft place where your jaw meets your ear. The bedside lamplight, speckling through your eyelashes.

Afterwards you rub off against his hip, pushing his hand away when he tries to help you, your head buried in his shoulder, gasping into his skin. He holds you in his arms, and he kisses your jaw, and your throat. You think about his fingers, splayed loosely on your back. You think about the steady thunder of his heart.

When you roll away he gets up to turn out the light. As he’s sliding back into the bedsheets, you say, “I like that. When you’re, you know. Gentle.”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute or so, but you can hear him breathing. At last he says, warm, “Yeah?”

“It’s not.” You sigh, flex your metal fingers in the rough sheets. “It’s not that I like it when you touch me.” He makes a mock-outraged noise, and you laugh, a little. “Okay, I do. But it’s that – I don’t just like it because it’s good in itself, but because–” You hesitate, trying to make the words arrange themselves. “Because it’s like I can feel what isn’t happening. I can feel – not being hit, or not being held down, or not having to run, or not shooting, or – like a lost tooth. Like I missed a step in the dark. It makes everything – bigger. Stranger. I like that.”

Outside the window, behind the curtain, a flare of headlights. A car passing by.

“I’m going to say something,” says Sam, “and I want you not to be angry at me.”

You turn your head on the pillow. It’s impossible to make out his features in the darkness. “Say it,” you tell him, eventually.

He says, “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t lived the life you've lived.”

You listen to your own breathing, for a while, the low thrum of the air conditioner.

“You were right,” you say. “I’m angry.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, and there’s the soft rustle of him turning over, away from you. “I know.”


End file.
